Abstract:
The purpose of land use planning, as conducted by the Forest Service, is to allocate land uses. The techniques employed in the current planning process fail to take location of the land allocations into account in any systematic manner. The resulting solutions may be inconsistent with planning goals; the land use patterns produced may not provide the maximum value of goods and services possible while protecting long-term biological productivity of the Forest. This study examines the impact of location on land allocation decisions, developing a strategy and set of techniques for incorporating spatial factors into the allocation process. Three spatial factors affect land allocation decisions: 1) the size of a land unit required to make management of a use practical, conflicts caused by the adjacent location of specific uses, and the need to organizes across the landscape to take advantage of certain characteristics of the planning unit.
Three promising strategies are investigated: 1) an optimizing
algorithm, 2) an efficient solution algorithm, and 3) an
assignment algorithm. The optimizing algorithm replaces the
linear program currently employed in the planning process with an
integer program able to consider location of land units in the allocation
process. The efficient solution algorithm uses an integer
program to create a land use pattern from the linear program
acreage allocations. Computer core size limitations and the size
and complexity of the planning problem prevent application of these
strategies. The assignment approach overcomes these difficulties
with a heuristic algorithm designed to locate linear program
allocations on the platining unit.
The computer programs required to support the spatial
allocation strategy include: 1) a computer mapping program,
2) a detail reductioti program, 3) an adjacency program,
4) the heuristic program, and 5) a conflict detection program.
The mapping program creates land units and keeps track of
their location. The detail reduction program eliminates some
complexity from the land base data. The adjacency program
identifies adjacent land units. The conflict detection program
detects conflicts caused by uses located adjacent to each other
and violations of minimum land unit size.
The spatial allocation strategy and its associated tools
are tested on the Clackamas Planning Unit of the Mt. Hood
National Forest. Results of this case study indicate that the
approach is workable with minor modifications.
